Those aren't "hostilities" we're engaged in with Libya -- I guess it's more of a, you know, tiff

The Republican view of presidential power c2007

by Ken

No doubt you caught the Obama administration's response to the charge that the president has exceeded the permissible "Go to War Free" -- i.e., without congressional approval -- period prescribed by the War Powers Act (1973). Here's how Charlie Savage and Mark Landler reported it in the NYT:

The White House, pushing hard against criticism in Congress over the deepening air war in Libya, asserted Wednesday that President Obama had the authority to continue the military campaign without Congressional approval because American involvement fell short of full-blown hostilities.

In a 38-page report sent to lawmakers describing and defending the NATO-led operation, the White House said the mission was prying loose Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s grip on power. . . . [T]he report asserted that “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.”

I don't know where on earth anyone would get the idea that we're engaged in hostilities with Libya. But "hostilities," as specified by the War Powers Act? Not a bit of it. Oh sure, in the heat of the moment harsh words may have been exchanged, and I suppose a fussbudget could quibble over all those bombs we've dropped, and assorted other military expenditures (which, however, "do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces," according to the administration report, "nor do they involve U.S. ground troops”), for which the tab, as Savage and Landler report the White House acknowledging, has run up to $716 million in the first two months and "at the current scale of operations" will rise to $1.1 billion by September.

But "hostilities"? Not that anyone in the administration can tell. In a joint interview, the Timesmen report, State Department legal adviser Harold Koh and White House counsel Robert Bauer --

contended that American forces had not been in “hostilities” at least since early April, when NATO took over the responsibility for the no-fly zone and the United States shifted to primarily a supporting role -- providing refueling and surveillance to allied warplanes, although remotely piloted drones operated by the United States periodically fire missiles, too.

It doesn't seem likely that the report is going to satisfy the demand made by House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner for a legal justification for passing the congressional reporting deadline. After all, Sunny John is a veritable tiger when it comes to enforcing the spirit and letter of the War Powers Act, as he showed throughout the warmongering years of the Bush regime.

Ha ha ha! Sometimes I just make myself laugh. Sunny John doesn't give a damn about war powers, or any other executive powers, unless they're being exercised by a Democratic excecutive. Savage and Landler note:

The escalating confrontation with Congress reflects the radically altered political landscape in Washington: a Democratic president asserting sweeping executive powers to deploy American forces overseas, while Republicans call for stricter oversight and voice fears about executive-branch power getting the United States bogged down in a foreign war.

All those years when "Big Dick" Cheney and his Puppet Prez Chimpy were using their 100 percent bogus "doctrine" of the "unitary executive" to expand executive powers in a way never before dreamt by American pols, nothing was heard from Republicans in either house except cheering -- and vicious invective and even threats directed against "Bush-bashers."

But then, Republicans are never called to account for even the most flagrant of their lies and the most blatant of their hypocrisies. A colleague notes the irony (again, not really the right word) of the proposed prohibition, in the House Appropriations Committee's proposed Fiscal Year 2012 Financial Services Appropriations Bill, of the Executive Office of the President's use of funds "to prepare 'signing statements,' which has been used in the past to undermine or circumvent laws passed by Congress." The colleague points out that when the House Judiciary Committee, then chaired by Democrat John Conyers Jr., tried briefly in 2007 to look into the matter of presidential signing statements, the subject was dismissed out of hand and ridiculed by Rpublican Ranking Member (now Committee Chairman) Lamar Smith.

Another colleague, while recognizing the total hypocrisy of the current Republican pushbacks against executive authority, syas we ought nevertheless to go along with their efforts, on the theory that it's at least a way to get some executive limitations legislated. It's a point, I suppose, but a point that misses the point, it seems to me. Congressional Republicans will never attempt to apply any such restrictions against a Republican president, and Congressional Democrats, as we've seen, will never attempt to apply such restrictions against a president of either party.

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The job of reclaiming the Justice Dept. from the Bush regime's wrecking ball is too big and too important to wait for a Democratic administration

As wacky as any of the other Federalist Society
wackos: Chief Justice John Roberts

On the one hand, you could argue that the executive-power-grabbing megalomaniacs of the Bush regime, while undeniably ruthless and insatiable in their lust for power, are in the end clueless morons. Because what happens if they actually succeed in overturning the Constitution and piling up all the power of the federal government in the executive branch -- and then have to turn all that power over to a Democrat when the country turns them out of office?

The other hand would be, I guess, that they don't worry because: (a) they don't believe any Democrat would dare try to assert the powers they've gathered unto themselves, which are actually for use only by far-right-wing Republican presidents, and (b) in any case they're prepared to turn on a dime and argue with equal ferocity and ruthlessness that for a Democratic president even so bold an act as drawing a breath would represent an intolerable usurpation of constitutional authority.

After all, we're not talking about people who are known for either rationality or consistency. They're only about getting their way, and I've got a feeling the day Chimpy the Prez ends his eight-year illegal squat in the White House, that will be the last we hear about the mystical -- and wholly mythical -- Unitary Executive, the all-powerful executive branch, until the next time wingnuts feel the Oval Office is again within reach of their beady clutches.

"Unitary Executive" -- or don't the wingnut law-mongers call it "the Doctrine of the Unitary Executive"? The better to make it sound as if there actually is such a thing. A "doctrine" indeed! Except that there is no such thing, not in or in any way connected to the Constitution. It's just a sick fantasy made up by dangerously psychopathic right-wingers, an authoritarian melange of bogus constitutionalese, gobbledygook, and garden-variety megalomania. What it seems to come down to is that these people for whatever reasons would like to recontour the model of government outlined in the Constitution to something closer to what you can find in Mein Kampf, with a president who's more or less interchangeable with the Reichsfuehrer of the Third Reich.

Apparently this is the sort of thing that passes for serious legal philosophy among the increasingly influential membership roster of the loony-tunes Federalist Society, which under the Bush regime has become, appallingly, a breeding ground not only for federal judges at the district and appellate levels, but for the Supreme Court itself.

I can't help feeling that most of this legal insanity is being let loose on the land because growing numbers of terminally repressed men have no safer or saner outline for all those raging hormones. In other words, the Republic has been put in peril because all these closet cases -- hetero as well as homo, they seem equally ashamed of and self-loathing over their sexual impulses -- need to be reintroduced to their trusty right (or left, as the case may be) hand?

Well, to judge just by Dick Cheney, he apparently doesn't get enough reinforcement of his manhood from hunting. Probably not enough, you know, release -- at least not of the kind he needs, not to be confused with the kind that puts his victims in the hospital.

Which brings me back to the U.S. attorney scandal. (Oh, you didn't realize that's what this was about?) For me, one of the greatest outrages of the Bush regime has been the systematic polliticization of the Justice Department, and one of my most agonized sources of frustration has been the inability to make this the raging issue it should be to ordinary voters -- why they should care, for example that U.S. attorneys, the legal point men who supervise the cadres of federal prosecutors in their districts, who oversee the administration of federal law, apparently have been transformed into bone-cracking enforcers, not prosecutors of the law but persecutors of the regime's political enemies. (And from what statistics we've been able to see, the Bush U.S. attorneys have gotten the message that their job is to prosecute almost exclusively Democrats.)

It's not an easy concept to define, this "rule of law" that we know instinctively is one of the fundamental components of our freedom. But it's pathetically easy to establish that when enforcement of the law is based, not on the fairest and most uniform possible application of law, but on the wishes of the people who control the legal system, you the rule of law is kaput.

No thanks to the regime's customary penchant for secrecy, we know by now that the wholesale firing of U.S. attorneys was pure and simple a political purge, and that it was moderated only by the realization that too flagrant a sweep of the "undesirables" among the USAs would draw the public attention that the firing program managed for so long to escape. But from what has been revealed, we have abundant indications that the only considerations according to which USAs were put on (or, rarely, taken off) the famous List were political.

And as many people have pointed out, the only thing scarier than the thought of purging competent USAs for insufficiently zealous political partisanship is the thought of what the un-purged ones did to keep their jobs. There are probably some honest and competent USAs who escaped the vengeance of (as best we can tell) Karl Rove, and if I were one of them, I would be as outraged as the good men and women who were improperly fired, because surviving the purge should be a mark of shame.

Oh, there are hardy warriors who haven't given up the fight, including watchdog groups like CREW and Judicial Watch. And the House Judiciary Committee is still trying to enforce its subpoenas of former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to probe the firing process.

Yesterday the AP reported that "twenty former U.S. attorneys from both political parties sided with Congress and asked a federal judge on Thursday to settle a subpoena fight with the White House."

Ex-prosecutors side with Congress in subpoena case

By MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Twenty former U.S. attorneys from both political parties sided with Congress and asked a federal judge on Thursday to settle a subpoena fight with the White House.

The former prosecutors filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit over whether Congress can demand documents and testimony from President Bush's closest aides.

The House Judiciary Committee wants to know whether some U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons, an issue that helped lead to the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The White House says the president's former counsel Harriet Miers and chief of chief of staff Josh Bolten do not need to comply with the subpoenas, citing executive privilege, the principle that one branch of government can't make another branch do something.

Congress wants a judge to settle the issue but the Bush administration says the courts should not wade into a political dispute.

The list of former U.S. attorneys who filed the documents in U.S. District Court includes David C. Iglesias, who says he was fired as New Mexico's top prosecutor for political reasons. The prosecutors said that, without congressional oversight, presidents would be free to meddle in prosecutorial decisions.

"If permitted to enforce its subpoenas for documents and testimony, Congress has a unique ability to address improper partisan influence in the prosecutorial process," the former prosecutors wrote. "No other institution will fill the vacuum if Congress is unable to investigate and respond to this evil."

The prosecutors who signed on to the document are: Steve Sachs, who was appointed by President Johnson; George Beall, an appointee of President Nixon; Roxanne Conlin, James K. Robinson, Atlee W. Wampler III and Edward G. Warin, appointees of President Carter; Leon Kellner, Dan K. Webb and J. Alan Johnson, who were appointed by President Reagan; William Braniff, an appointee of the first President Bush; Zach Carter, Edward L. Dowd, B. Todd Jones, Doug Jones, Donald K. Stern, Sheldon Whitehouse and Alan Bersin, who were appointed by President Clinton; Bush appointees Iglesias and Matthew D. Orwig, and Richard Rossman, who was appointed by the court in 1980.

Four watchdog groups filed their own court papers Thursday also siding with Congress. Conservative groups Judicial Watch and the Rutherford Institute joined the Brennan Center for Justice and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, both liberal groups.

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TORTURE AS OFFICIAL POLICY OF THE STATE

A few days ago Andrew Sullivan predicted that Bush and Cheney would one day be handed over to a war crimes tribunal. I'm sure I'd like to see it far more than he would-- but if he even believes it with 20% of his being, that's 20% more than I believe it. In this case the politics of the possible will trump what's right and wrong. The pathetic excuse for a Speaker of the House can't even allow an investigation to determine if there should be impeachment hearings; who's going to hand these two criminals over to the Hague? But if we humor Sullivan for a moment, the torture memo to end all torture memos (by criminal-minded Neocon attorney John Yoo) will surely be send over with them. The 81 page document was sent over to Capitol Hill after a lengthy battle to keep it secret.

Federal laws prohibiting assault and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned [suspected] al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander-in-chief overrode such statutes, according to a newly declassified 2003 Justice Department memo released today.

The memo--which was rescinded just nine months after it was issued--provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war, contending that numerous laws and treaties that forbid torture or cruel treatment should not apply to the interrogations of enemy combatants overseas.

...The memo asserts that domestic and international laws and treaties, as well as the U.S. Constitution, would not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers.

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote in the memo. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

Aside from doing his best to undermine the Geneva Conventions and push forward a legalistic veil for an imperial presidency (the so-called "unitary executive theory"), Yoo also was one of the drafters of the fascist-oriented so-called Patriot Act (which is to patriotism what the Clean Skies act is to breathing). Yoo, the kind of immigrant we should be deporting, hasn't been shipped back to Korea or even imprisoned. In fact he teaches at UC, Berkeley, warping the minds of young students with this bizarre ideological agenda.

In his 2007 book, The Terror Presidency, Jack Goldsmith, who was head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004, writes that the Yoo memorandum was one of two internal Justice Department opinions that "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis."

Among many other problems, Goldsmith wrote, both memos "were wildly broader than was necessary to support what was actually being done."

Rear Adm. Michael F. Lohr, the Navy's top lawyer, asked in a memo at the time whether the American people would find "we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values?"

Korea was still a fascist dictatorship when Yoo was born. Looking at his work since coming to America, there is every reason to believe that fascist values have been embedded in his being. Leave it to Bush and Cheney to drag this piece of garbage into their regime and set him lose.